For Pakistan's children water is water, dirty or not (Feature)

By Nadeem Sarwar and Farrukh Azeem Aug 17, 2010, 16:03 GMT

Multan, Pakistan - The water has turned green in Moza Hamroot, a village of mud huts surrounded by mango trees near the central Pakistan city of Multan.

But it's all there is to drink for Anas, a 4-year-old struggling to survive since his village was submerged when a canal overflowed last week during the devastating floods gripping the Asian country.

'What's wrong with this water?' asked the youngster as he sipped the dirty water from a plastic bottle he was sharing with his father and five brothers and sisters while eating a meal of boiled rice.

'It does not taste bad,' said the boy, who was wearing only a dark brown shalwar, a traditional Pakistani loose trouser.

His father, Mohammad Sahrif, was constantly flicking his hand over the plate with the rice to disperse obstinate flies just as desperate for food as the flood victims.

'The water is dirty. We know that, but do we have any other choice,' said Sharif, who lives in the village with around 125 other families, who all share the same fate.

'This water has saved our lives since we took refuge on this place which is a bit higher and safe. But the water is also making our children sick,' Sharif said, pointing to a 3-year-old with a swollen belly lying on charpoy, a traditional woven bed made of wood.

'He has gestro (gastroenteritis) and we are getting no medicine here,' he added. Hundreds of kilometers southward, in metropolitan Karachi, water-borne diseases have already taken two lives.

At a refugee camp set up for the flood victims from rural areas of Sindh province, a 4-year-old boy died of an intestinal infection and a 6-day-old infant from tetanus, media reports said.

The UN children fund UNICEF said Tuesday that women and children 'not in hundreds of thousands but in millions,' were at risk.

'We have a country that has endemic water diarrhoea, endemic cholera, and endemic respiratory infection. And we have conditions for much-expanded problems in those areas,' Daniel Toole, the agency's regional director, said in Islamabad.

The floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains two weeks ago have killed 1,400 people, submerged one-fifth of the country and destroyed more than 700,000 houses as well as hundreds of kilometres of roads and numerous bridges.

Riots for food have been reported. Hundreds of people, among them women and children, scuffled with each other and then with the police over relief items in the city of Sukkur on Tuesday.

Television footage showed police baton-charging the hungry victims and dragging women by their hair.

A few kilometers outside Sukkur, 2-months-old Zulikha was battling for survival in a makeshift relief centre set up in a school. She nearly drowned when her family was wading through waist-deep water in the village of Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi.

'We drained the water from her stomach by holding her face downwards from her legs, but she is still sick and we have not received any medical assistance,' said her mother, as the baby barely breathed.

Despite the massive suffering, assistance from the Pakistani government and international community has been slow. Inefficiency and bureaucratic red-tape have hampered the government's efforts.

Martin Mogwanja, UN humanitarian coordinator for Pakistan, complained of the sluggish international response, saying the UN had so far received only 160 million dollars out of 460 million dollars asked for.

'This is far less than what we need at this urgent time as millions of people remain in urgent need,' he said.

With the lack of aid, millions of children are going to suffer, not immediately but in the long terms, if the world does not come up with a better plan.

UNICEF representative Toole, expressed concern about an intensification in child-trafficking, which has already forced thousands into slavery and even prostitution both at home and abroad.

He said that 'some unscrupulous people take advantage of the situation' and the biggest danger is that those who have lost their livelihood might give their children away for child labour.